The Keys to Heaven

Dionysus

An enigmatic and deeply secretive god, one whose secret cults and mysteries are said to persist even to this day.

Description:

He is the god of wildness and abandon, madness and lack of inhibitions, and to that end he is also the god of wine and the patron of sexual freedom. The wild, ecstatic orgies of his followers, the Maenads, are legendary. He may owe much of his closeness to such primal urges to the fact that, of all the Olympians, he is the only one to be born half-human; he made his way from Scion to godhood and took his place on Olympus among the long-established children of the titans. As the god of sexual freedom, he is also a fertility god, representative not only of the act of procreation in humans and animals but also of the renewal and bounty of the earth. He is the bringer of divine insanity, who grants to his followers not only reckless madness but also the secret, half-glimpsed wisdom that only madness can bestow.